2023-08-28 05:42:01
MEXICO CITY (AP) — In a mountainous area south of Mexico City, brigades of rangers and volunteers plant pine trees just inches tall amid broken branches and severed trunks in a clearing that was once dense forest. At times the intermittent hum of a chainsaw sounds in the distance.
“The forest is gone,” said sadly Alfredo Gutiérrez, 43, from the capital’s San Miguel Topilejo community. A year ago “it looked dark even though there was sun from all the trees there were.”
More than half of Mexico City is a rural area and almost 20% are protected natural areas, including forests located to the south that guarantee the recharge of the aquifers that supply the majority of the 20 million inhabitants of the city. capital and its suburbs, trees that clean the polluted air of the city and serve to contain the high temperatures.
These forests are now more threatened than ever by illegal logging, an activity partly linked to organized crime and which was already rampaging in other parts of the country.
The government of Mexico City began joint operations with the Armed Forces and other institutions two months ago and has increased its reforestation efforts, but only a small percentage of those trees will survive and it will take years to grow while the loggers continue to destroy the bigger and older trees, those that absorb more carbon dioxide.
It is planted on one side, felled on the other.
The city has 150,000 hectares. According to the Global Forest Watch organization, which measures deforestation around the world, the capital had 40,500 hectares covered with trees in 2010. In 2022 it lost 49 hectares, more than in the previous four years combined.
Pablo Amezcua, a natural resources engineer and adviser to the San Miguel Topilejo authorities, has also recorded an increase in logging. According to his data, before 2020 there were only about 200 hectares affected by logging in the town, now there are about 2,400.
The complaints also grew. According to data from the government’s Transparency Platform, the Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection has registered 122 complaints of logging in Mexico City since 2013, 62 of them in the first seven months of this year.
The trucks of brigade members and rangers from Topilejo -some direct government workers, others financed by local authorities through social projects- were advancing along a road where the vehicle could barely fit after participating in a reforestation day with students and families to raise awareness about the care of forests. The National Guard and the Army escorted them.
A 24-year-old behind the wheel was looking both ways. The last time he passed by, two days before, there were trees where there were now cut trunks and a tangle of broken branches that they would later clean up to make them less dangerous in case of fire.
Almost all the residents of San Miguel Topilejo ask that their name be protected out of fear. The loggers don’t play games: the 58-year-old co-pilot says he was shot in the abdomen in November when they tried to stop them. He had previously had to leave his community for more than a year because they had threatened his family.
Mexico is the deadliest country in the world for environmental activists – who are often the peasants themselves who are in charge of communally owned land – according to the latest report by the non-governmental organization Global Witness, which recorded 54 murders in 2021. This year, two Environmentalists were killed in June near the capital in the neighboring State of Mexico, in a protected area near the Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl volcanoes. One of them ran a research center at a public university and was attacked with an ax.
Given the accelerated urbanization of the city from the second half of the 20th century and the proliferation of settlements on the slopes of the mountains, the authorities decreed a ban to preserve the forests and logging was absolutely prohibited, a decision that some experts consider it essential and that it should be maintained, but that others believe that it has fueled illegality.
The rangers of San Miguel Topilejo say that the increase in logging is due to the fact that many criminals who were in the stolen fuel business switched to this activity when the federal government began to close spaces to that illegal business with intense operations in 2019.
But Marina Robles, the city’s Secretary of the Environment, assured that the problem comes from much earlier and that many interests intersect, including real estate, and various actors such as organized crime.
Organized crime used to use these capital mountains to dump the corpses of their victims. But these gangs, as in other parts of Mexico, are interested not only in controlling territories but in all the lucrative activities that take place there.
As the number of heavily armed groups linked to logging increased, many of those tending the forest felt overwhelmed, began demanding more help and blocked roads in protest.
It was then, at the end of June, when the city government began joint operations between different departments, authorities from several states, and more than 500 soldiers.
In the first days of August, the city’s mayor, Martí Batres, said that 32 logging companies and 28 clandestine sawmills had been dismantled in the capital and a dozen more in the neighboring state of Morelos, and that five highly organized criminal groups had been identified.
“They arrive at a place, they find certain conditions, they set up the sawmill, they cut trees, but very quickly, that is, in one morning or one night, they begin to process them and then they raise the sawmill” and put it in another place, he explained. “This is dynamic, the information has to be constantly updated.”
Batres aspires to close the illegal timber market and reform local laws so that the crime of logging is punished more severely. It is now difficult to prosecute many of the detainees, in part, because the residents are afraid to testify against them.
The loggers have reacted aggressively to the operations by burning brigade trucks and even, on one occasion, dousing the soldiers themselves with gasoline, confirmed neighbors and a soldier.
There are also residents who have burned vans belonging to criminals if they have been found, acknowledged the person who was injured last year. But the fight is unequal. “They have high-powered weapons,” he commented. “These criminals have surpassed us.”
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